President doesn't understand economic realities

The Philadelphia Inquirer – published Tuesday, March 3, 2015

In his 2010 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama promised to double exports over five years to “support” 2 million jobs in America. A year later he claimed the new U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement would “support” 70,000 jobs at home. And today, his Commerce Department boasts that U.S. exports “support” 11.3 million jobs.

As the fictional Inigo Montoya famously said on screen, “I don’t think that word means what you think it means.” That’s because total U.S. exports have increased only 48 percent since 2009, while a 60 percent jump in our trade deficit with South Korea has triggered, according to one estimate, the loss of nearly 60,000 American jobs.

Now, as Obama pushes for “fast-track” authority to ram through Congress the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, Americans should ask: Are we better off today than we were 20 years ago?

That’s when the North America Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization ushered in the globalized economy favored by Wall Street, multinational corporations, and transnational governmental bureaucracies. And when the majority of workers began to see their labor-force participation and employment prospects plummet, wages and benefits stagnate, and living standards decline.

While the government’s most-recent tally counts 5,590 jobs for every $1 billion of exports, the bureaucrats haven’t developed a multiplier to capture jobs lost to imports — a much larger figure. Yet that hasn’t kept resourceful economists from quantifying the downside of our gaping trade imbalances.

According to conservative estimates by Robert Scott of the Economic Policy Institute, granting China “most favored nation” status drained away 3.2 million American jobs, including 2.4 million in manufacturing, between 2001 and 2013. He pegs net job losses due to our trade deficit with Japan ($78.3 billion in 2013) at 896,600, as well as an additional 682,900 from the Mexico-U.S. trade-deficit run-up from 1994 through 2010.

The combined losses to these three nations alone are stunning: 4.8 million jobs, including 320,600 jobs in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, whose cumulative trade deficits since 2008 exceed $878 billion, according to www.tradingawayjobs.us.

Meanwhile, a macro-analysis of 2013 data by Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy Research estimates that eliminating the entire U.S. trade deficit would create 6.3 million jobs, both directly and through multiplier effects. Baker offers no state breakdown, but applying Scott’s state-to-national job-loss ratios suggest that balanced trade would mean 422,600 more jobs for the two states.

Obama is not alone in ignoring these warnings. Sen. Marco Rubio, R., Fla., contends in his book “American Dreams” that “fair and reciprocal” trade arrangements deliver coveted jobs at home. That may be true, but NAFTA-style pacts and the proposed TPP and TTIP are neither fair nor reciprocal. Perhaps the 2016 hopeful and other Republicans want to help achieve the deindustrialization of America that would result if Obama secures the two largest globalist treaties in history.

Yet there’s more at stake than jobs and factories. Two decades of trade entanglements have rendered the country, in the words of Daniel DiMicco, former Nucor Steel CEO, “a dwindling superpower teetering on the brink of second-class economy status.” Granting the president fast-track and ratifying his trade deals would complete the “transformation” of America to which Obama has devoted his presidency.

Unless more knowledgeable voices emerge in Washington to block his overreach, a strong and independent America — the only guarantee of our liberty, ideals, and standard of living — will soon be history.

Robert W. Patterson served in the administrations of President George W. Bush and former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett. He wrote this for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Shortly after, Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, writing in Commentary, defended Judge Moore’s view as well within the mainstream of our political history. So far, so good. The idea that certain of our rights are conferred on us by God was a staple of much of the 17th- and 18th-century political thought that informed the work of the Founders.

But then Wehner makes a huge leap from an easily documented claim about our political history to a sweeping claim about the very foundations of morality in general. “Absent a Creator,” he asks rhetorically, “what is the argument against capriciousness, injustice, and tyranny? How does one create a system of justice and make the case against, say, slavery, if you begin with two propositions: one, the universe was created by chance; and two, it will end in nothing? How do you derive a belief in a moral law that is binding on you and others apart from theism?”

I’ve never understood the intellectual and moral security that people find in the view, however widely held, that “absent a Creator” morality has no basis. The first person to suggest otherwise, to the best of my knowledge, was Socrates in a short Platonic dialogue devoted to this very topic. At the outset, Socrates’ partner in the conversation is absolutely certain, like Wehner, that it’s God who determines which of our actions are morally right and which morally wrong.

But Socrates points out that there are at least two ways to understand that claim. On the one hand, it could be just God’s say-so that makes anything right or wrong. On this version of the story, actions have no inherent moral qualities, but only those that God assigns to them. Or it could be that actions have moral qualities independent of God’s say-so, and it’s their inherent moral qualities, not God’s decrees, that show us what we ought to do or forbear.

I don’t think many people would accept the “God’s say-so” story if they thought about it at all. If we take that story seriously, we don’t live in what to most of us would be a moral universe. Rather, we live in a “might-makes-right” universe because the only reason we’d have to do what God commands is that He has the power to cast us into an unspeakably miserable eternity if we don’t.

In fact, contrary to Wehner, most of us don’t derive our moral beliefs from our religious beliefs, but do exactly the opposite, convinced apparently that some actions are just inherently right or wrong. That’s crystal clear when people like President Obama say, without a murmur of dissent outside the ranks of the beheaders and enslavers, that no god would tell anybody to behead innocent journalists and aid workers or rape and sell 13-year-old girls into slavery.

And how do we know this? Because we’re as certain as we are of anything that such actions are too hideously immoral to find favor with any deity worthy of our devotion. In other words, it’s our idea of God that has to conform to our moral beliefs, not the other way around.

If we believe, then, that actions are inherently right or wrong, independent of God’s say-so, we have to figure out the moral terrain for ourselves. In some cases, the morality of some act, like burning people alive, is about as close to self-evident as anything could be.

But what those horrendous cases show is that even in ordinary life, it’s not our religious beliefs that are doing the moral work. The religious beliefs that we appeal to in daily life are relevant only because they’ve met the moral standards we measure them against and have arrived at on other grounds.

Wehner notwithstanding, we’re not totally helpless about what those other grounds could be. Some of humanity’s most powerful minds, beginning with Socrates, have thought about them deeply.

So while the belief that some rights are God-given is an interesting feature of our political history, it’s much less obvious that theism is an indispensable ahistorical foundation of any of our rights or of morality generally.

The State Department <http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/department-of-state/> has helped to relocate tens of thousands of refugees from the war-torn African nation of Somalia <http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/somalia/> to Minnesota, where they can take advantage of some of America’s most generous welfare and charity programs. But the effort is having the unintended consequence of creating an enclave of immigrants with high unemployment that is both stressing the state’s safety net and creating a rich pool of potential recruiting targets for Islamist <http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/islamist/> terror groups. In the fiscal year that ended in September, Minnesota welcomed 1,118 Somali refugees arriving directly from Africa, most of them without family ties to the state, according to State Department <http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/department-of-state/> statistics. Overall, more than 30,000 Somalis live in the midwestern state comprising the nation’s largest concentration of Somali immigrants, according to U.S. Census data. Many of the refugees settle near the Twin Cities, with Minneapolis <http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/minneapolis/> being dubbed “Little Mogadishu” after the capital of Somalia < http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/somalia/> . This population is also being targeted by Islamist <http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/islamist/> terror organizations like the Islamic State and al-Shabab, a Somalia <http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/somalia/> -based group with links to al Qaeda, according to U.S. officials. Among Minnesota-based Somali-Americans, American converts to Islam or Somali refugees, there have been numerous convictions for various levels of collaboration with Islamist <http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/islamist/> terror groups, plus reports of fighting with al-Shabab or other Islamist <http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/islamist/> groups. On Sunday, al-Shabab made a propaganda video warning of an attack on shopping malls around the world, including the Mall of America in Minnesota. Al <http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/al-franken/> -Shabab claimed responsibility for the terror attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Kenya two years ago, which left 67 dead.“We have definitely seen targeted terror recruitment videos, videos aimed and targeted directly at the youth here in Minnesota primarily within the Somali community,” said Kyle Loven, an FBI spokesman in Minneapolis <http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/minneapolis/> . “They’re going after disaffected youth — those who are isolated. We can’t get into specifics, but we’ve been involved in major investigations since 2007 and continue to be.”Most of Minnesota’s Somali population started off as legal refugees through a program administered by the U.S. State Department <http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/department-of-state/> through the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration. Minnesota was selected among the nation’s states for relocation primarily because of its robust entitlement offerings and the number of charitable organizations operating within the state with which the State Department <http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/department-of-state/> contracts.“Minnesota is exceptional in many ways but it’s the closest thing in the United States to a true social democratic state,” said Ahmed Samatar, a professor of international studies at Macalester College, in St. Paul.“That translates into the way Somali refugees have been received here they’ve been given a secure environment, housing, education, health care, perhaps even some minimum income to sustain them until they can stand on their own feet. That’s all provided by Minnesota,” said Mr. Samatar, who has tracked the State Department <http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/department-of-state/> ’s refugee program. Outside Alaska, Minnesota spends more per low-income person on public welfare than any other state in the U.S., according to a report by the Center for the American Experiment, a think tank located in Minneapolis <http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/minneapolis/> . The report found Minnesota outspent its average peer state in welfare subsidies by nearly $4,000. In addition to its generous welfare subsidies, Minnesota also has a number of charitable organizations that contract with the State Department <http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/department-of-state/> like Lutheran Social Services, Catholic Charities, and World Relief Minnesota. Those organizations agree to help the Somali refugees learn English, get health care, find housing and gradually learn to adopt the U.S. as home. The State Department <http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/department-of-state/> didn’t specifically say why Minnesota was selected early in its Somali refugee relocation program only that: “Resettlement locations are chosen for a variety of factors, including communities where a refugee has a family or social tie, where the local resettlement agency has the requisite language skills and social services, and where jobs are available so that refugees can begin the transition to self-sufficiency,” said Larry Bartlett, the U.S. Refugee Admissions program director, in a statement to the Washington Times. Story Continues → <http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/feb/24/islamist-terror-groups-target-minnesota-somali-ref/?page=2>

Investigative sources in California say that radical Muslims are planning to go on a rampage in the city of Los Angeles, killing anyone who is a U.S. citizen. Police officials fear the death toll could be as high as 9.

How much does it take to be in the 1%? It definitely doesn’t take millions, and it all depends on where you live.

According to a recent report by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, to be in the 1% looks something like this:

Officially, to be considered in the top 1% in America, your household income would need to be well north of $380,000, according to IRS 2014 data. On a state-by-state level, the benchmark fluctuates, as you can see below.

Beyond the fun imaging, the EPI uses this map and the accompanying report to show a grim trend: The rich are getting richer, while the poor aren’t going anywhere, growth-wise.

According to the EPI report, income growth has been lopsided since the end of the Great Recession in 2009, with the top 1% of income earners grabbing an “alarming” share of the growth. In 39 states, the top income earners have captured more than 50% of all economic growth between 2009-2012. Meanwhile, the bottom 99% saw incomes grow by just 20%, according to the report.

These findings are in line with other research. Pew cites that America’s wealth gap between middle and upper-class citizens is the widest on record. On a global level, Oxfam reports that the world’s top 1% may soon own a majority of the wealth, a problem so worrying that it made it atop the agenda at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

More on the map

The most unequal states in the U.S.? According to the EPI report, New York and Connecticut had the largest gaps in 2012 between the average incomes of the top 1% and the bottom 99%, with the 1% earning more than 48 times the income of the poorest residents.

There are also outliers on the map: It takes $502,000 to be in the 1% in North Dakota — a higher salary than is needed to be in the top echelon in both California and Texas. North Dakota was the only state to see a significant increase in household incomes and a decrease in poverty rates during the period of the Great Recession, according to U.S. Census Bureau data, largely because of its strong energy sector.

You do not have to be a veteran to have goose bumps run down your body. Just watch this short video and think. The narrator would roll over in his grave if he knew what our present administration looks like. This is an incredibly great video. Stirs you right down to your toes. I will pass this to all I can as it is one of the best " America Tributes"!! It's from a time when the United States had a President who truly loved his country.

Wonder what all the hoopla is over "Drones" in the USA? Take a look at the video link below and watch it in full-screen. Russian dude has created a remotely controlled quadroto-copter fitted out with a 100 round machine gun.Watch him as he has fun blowing up mannequins and cars. It's all done with a touch of humor, but the reality is that this fellow has created a very lethal killing machine that could be remotely controlled and come into your yard, or house and kill everyone there.Then it can fly away or be self-destructed.These types of robots have so much 'stealth' killing power, populations of the near future have a reason to be worried about what can happen to them over a Sunday Bar-B-Q.http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=SNPJMk2fgJU

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